Donari Braxton, a 2014 Independent Filmmaker Lab alum for director Takeshi Fukanaga’s Out of My Hand, recently attended the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Their film was selected to play in the Panorama section of the festival, you see, and Braxton, ever the goodhearted and honest person, was kind enough …]]>

Donari Braxton, a 2014 Independent Filmmaker Lab alum for director Takeshi Fukanaga’s Out of My Hand, recently attended the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Their film was selected to play in the Panorama section of the festival, you see, and Braxton, ever the goodhearted and honest person, was kind enough to provide a visual diary of his experience. The views expressed below are solely (and unmistakably!) his own, and if you enjoy, be sure to follow him on Twitter and Instagram to keep up-to-date on Out of My Hand’s journey. Be sure to click on each image for a larger, full-size view.

— Erik Luers

Our first ever opening gala —just like it is on TV, except your palms are sweaty. Domestic and international stars sashay, stopping at will for strategically-positioned paparazzi pits, who fight over candid’s by screaming strange overtures in German at the top of their lungs (nobody was particularly interested in screaming at us, or taking our picture). Takeshi nearly sprints the red carpet through the fray toward the Palast, an attempt to flee the madness — I pull on his coattail with a chuckle and tell him, slow down man, it’s the red carpet, enjoy. He did, and we did — and we laughed a lot about it.

Inside, we spend most of the evening happily struggling through perfectly bizarre aesthetic confabs with Canadian diplomats — an apparently not-uncommon experience at these types of events.

In the daytime, we’re amazed at how much Berlin real estate is dedicated to the festival. Streets, subways, bathrooms — virtually all Berliners are at least aware the festival’s taking place. You wish independent film could be promoted with anywhere near as much gusto in New York City.

Photo courtesy of Donari Braxton

Our film’s pre-screening and world premiere were all sold out. The facilities are state-of-the art — large screens and crystal audio kind of killing what we tend to experience in New York. A vast majority number of the audience stays for the Q&A’s. The German audience is generally incredibly engaged, smart, and feisty. We did not have a PR Company attached to our film, and so went in to the public arena blind (this is not advisable). But at least we learned a lot. Namely, that Q and A’s are a bit harder than they look. And also, that every audience is different. And also, that every audience has at least one bad apple in it. (Said bad apple does not wish to ask questions when he asks questions, rather, wishes to speak publicly in question form — at your expense, if he can manage.) We got better at identifying said bad apples by-and-by — it’s a trial-by-fire thing.

Photo courtesy of Donari Braxton

This is Berlinale’s renowned European Film Market. It serves as the de facto daytime hub of the festival. I’d be lying if I said I knew what happens here. It’s chaos. Theoretically, film’s are bought, often here by region, by buyers who make said deals in one of the many sexy European sales agent kiosks placed by unspoken-order-of-repute throughout the building. We had countless meetings here, not only with sales agents, but with distributors, producers, and all other walks of the industrial food web. The market also houses a semi-circular room dedicated to a program called American Independents in Berlin (its mission being to screen and sell selected films to EFM buyers), which we were extremely lucky to have been selected for, thanks to Milton Tabbot and our incredible friends and mentors at IFP.

We took great relief in Milton’s permanent somehow-always-grumpy-but-not face, which made us feel at home — as well as in the familiar faces of other IFP friends like Shrihari Sathe (pictured above with Kaia Roemer), producer of It Felt Like Love, who was a panelist during our life-changing participation in IFP’s Narrative Feature Film Labs and who latterly gave us a lot of great festival-related advice. As for Berlinale’s own staff, we couldn’t have been more warmly welcomed — thoughtful, organized, and kind.

Photo courtesy of Donari Braxton

The parties are predictably incredible (a splice of Berlinale’s official Forum section party, above). You make friends and you network and you learn — and yes, discover ever novel ways of fucking up as you go. If you’re as lucky as I was, you get to smoke a couple of cigarettes alone on a terrace with Audrey Tautou and bond with her over a favorite neighborhood in Paris.

Photo courtesy of Donari Braxton

Then later, because you think you made friends, embarrass yourself by trying to join her at a dinner table of Main Competition Jurors including Bong Joon-ho and Daniel Brühl, receive a swift fuck-off-face, and get called “the crazy guy” by Darren Aronofsky for the rest of the night. So there’s that. (It’s a learning process).

Photo courtesy of Donari Braxton

Takeshi and myself, in the most ridiculous hat I could find on the streets of Berlin and that Takeshi says makes me look like a puppy dog, with larger-than-life characters Paz Lázaro, Panorama’s Programming Director, and Wieland Speck, the section’s Curator and Director —who told us, to our total surprise, that he’d learned of our movie way back when we were accepted into IFP’s Narrative Labs in June, had been shown a rough cut by IFP, and had been following the film’s developments since that time.

In a pre-sale agreement, a buyer licenses or pre-buys movie distribution rights for a territory before the film has been produced. The deal works something like this: Filmmaker Henry, or his sales agent, approaches Distributor Juan to sign a contract to buy the right to distribute Henry’s next film. Henry …]]>

In a pre-sale agreement, a buyer licenses or pre-buys movie distribution rights for a territory before the film has been produced. The deal works something like this: Filmmaker Henry, or his sales agent, approaches Distributor Juan to sign a contract to buy the right to distribute Henry’s next film. Henry gives Juan a copy of the script and tells him the names of the principal cast members.

Juan has distributed several of Henry’s films in the past. He paid $50,000 for the right to distribute Henry’s last film in Spain. The film did reasonably well and Juan feels confident, based on Henry’s track record, the script, and the proposed cast, that his next film should also do well in Spain. Juan is willing to license Henry’s next film sight-unseen before it has been produced. By buying distribution rights to the film now, Juan is obtaining an advantage over competitors who might bid for it. Moreover, Juan may be able to negotiate a lower license fee than what he would pay if the film were sold on the open market. So Juan signs a contract agreeing to buy Spanish distribution rights to the film. Juan does not have to pay (except if a deposit is required) until completion and delivery of the film to him.

Henry now takes this contract, and a dozen similar contracts with buyers, to the bank. Henry asks the bank to lend him money to make the movie with the distribution contracts as collateral. Henry is “banking the paper.” The bank will not lend Henry the full face value of the contracts, but instead will discount the paper and lend a smaller sum. So if the contracts provide for a cumulative total of $1,000,000 in license fees, the bank might lend Henry $800,000.

Henry uses the loan from the bank to produce his film. When the movie is completed, he delivers it to the companies that have already licensed it. They in turn pay their license fees to Henry’s bank to retire Henry’s loan. The bank receives repayment of its loan plus interest. The buyers receive the right to distribute the film in their territory. Henry can now license the film in territories that remain unsold. From these revenues Henry makes his profit.

Juan’s commitment to purchase the film must be unequivocal, and his company financially secure, so that a bank is willing to lend Henry money on the strength of Juan’s promise and ability to pay. If the contract merely states that the buyer will review and consider purchasing the film, this commitment is not strong enough to borrow against. Banks want to be assured that the buyer will accept delivery of the film as long as it meets certain technical standards, even if artistically the film is a disappointment. The bank will also want to know that Juan’s company is fiscally solid and likely to be in business when it comes time for it to pay the license fee. If Juan’s company has been in business for many years, and if the company has substantial assets on its balance sheet, the bank will usually lend against the contract.

In some circumstances, banks are willing to lend more than the face value of the contracts. This is called gap financing, and since the bank is assuming a greater risk of not being repaid its loan, higher fees are charged. Gap financing is helpful if the filmmaker is unable to secure enough pre-sales to cover the loan. The bank lends more than the amount of pre-sales based on its belief that the gap will be covered when unsold territories are licensed. Before agreeing to supply gap financing, the bank will carefully review the existing pre-sales and extrapolate from those sales an estimate as to what other territories might fetch. The estimate might be based on the bank’s experience that a film licensed to Italy for $150,000 usually fetches $100,000 in Spain. Of course, there is no guarantee that when the film is completed that a Spanish buyer will license the film, so the bank wants to see projected revenue that is at least twice the amount of any gap. This ensures that even if some territories remain unsold, the gap is likely to be covered. Moreover, the bank will rely on the reputation and track record of the sales agent and/or producer in judging whether these estimates are realistic. Banks may decline to lend funds based on projections from a sales agent with a history of overly optimistic projections.

The bank often insists on a com­pletion bond to ensure that the filmmaker has sufficient funds to finish the film. Banks are not willing to take much risk. They know that Juan’s commitment to buy Henry’s film is contingent on delivery of a completed film. But what if Henry goes over budget and cannot finish the film? If Henry doesn’t deliver the film, Juan is not obligated to pay for it, and the bank is not repaid its loan.

To avoid this risk, the bank wants a completion guarantor, a type of insurance company, to agree to put up any money needed to complete the film should it go over budget. Before issuing a bond, a completion guarantor will carefully review the proposed budget and the track record of key production personnel. Unless the completion guarantor is confident that the film can be brought in on budget, no completion bond will be issued.

First-time filmmakers may find it difficult to finance their films based on pre-sales. With no track record of successful films to their credit, they may not be able to persuade a distributor to pre-buy their work. How does the distributor know that the filmmaker can produce something their audiences will want to see? Of course, if the other elements are strong, the distributor may be persuaded to take that risk. For example, even though the filmmaker may be a first-timer, if the script is from an acclaimed writer, and several big-name actors will participate, the overall package may be attractive.

Additional information can be found in the book Risky Business by Mark Litwak

CineMart has always had a focus on producers who are taking the first steps of their careers. Several years ago, the CineMart staff realised that many new producers lack the knowledge on how to operate in an international film festival or market setting. Consequently, in 2001, based on the belief …]]>

CineMart has always had a focus on producers who are taking the first steps of their careers. Several years ago, the CineMart staff realised that many new producers lack the knowledge on how to operate in an international film festival or market setting. Consequently, in 2001, based on the belief that these skills are vital for any producer, CineMart decided to provide young professionals the means to develop an international network by organzing the first CineMart International Trainee Project, later renamed the Rotterdam Lab. — www.iffr.com

This is the second of two blog entries producer Chris Ohlson contributed to the IFP Blog. To read the first entry, click here.

The Rotterdam Producing Lab is just like going to camp, except that the attendees are dozens of the world’s brightest and most interesting emerging independent film producers.

The Rotterdam Labs brought together 58 delegates (I’ll call them global-entrepreneurial-super-producers) from all over the world and put us all together for a week of scheduled events and activities. Really, what the great folks at CineMart and the Labs wanted us to do – was to get to know one other.

In making independent films, building your team of collaborators and your network are some of the most essential ingredients. The Rotterdam Labs help producers from all corners of the world to have a bigger, better, more personal global network. The global-entrepreneurial-super-producers need to bond. And that’s exactly what happens and the result will be future co-productions and amazing independent films!

To a certain degree, co-productions seem like another world for some of us American Producers. We don’t have public funds readily available for our projects and the only means to get things funded is through private means or the studio system (highly unlikely). The rest of the world’s producers have a very different strategy for financing their films and it’s incredibly helpful to hear about the unique way in which they partner and raise financing. Whether it’s government funding from a specific country, pre-sales, or unique partnerships, The Labs provide a space to talk about and discuss these different business models and approaches.

Through lectures, case-studies, and a plethora of guest speakers from the industry, we’re all encouraged to step outside our country’s specific filmmaking strategy or approach – and learn from others.

After the learning comes the networking (which is arguably just as, if not more important). Global-entrepreneurial-super-producers are encouraged to attend nightly cocktail parties (where we’re joined by all the folks at CineMart) where even more ‘getting to know one another’ really happens. The mingling and mixing with people from all walks of the industry was a great way to develop ongoing relationships over the week-long market.

Because of the Labs, I’ve got a wildly updated global rolodex and dozens of new potential collaborators spread all across the world – and I can’t wait to start putting all of these new movie puzzle pieces together into new projects!

]]>http://www.ifp.org/resources/rotterdam-cinemart-so-one-day-at-camp/feed/0A Totally Righteous Time at the International Film Festival Rotterdamhttp://www.ifp.org/resources/bradleyrotterdam/
http://www.ifp.org/resources/bradleyrotterdam/#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 18:12:23 +0000http://www.ifp.org/?p=21983

The 44th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam will took place from January 21st to February 1st. One of the largest public film events in the world, IFFR actively supports independent filmmaking from around the globe and is a recognized platform in Europe for launching new films and talent. — www.iffr.com

Before visiting …]]>

The 44th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam will took place from January 21st to February 1st. One of the largest public film events in the world, IFFR actively supports independent filmmaking from around the globe and is a recognized platform in Europe for launching new films and talent. — www.iffr.com

Before visiting Rotterdam, I had a dream of having with me only a jacket and a scarf too small for my neck. A strong sense of openness, future forward buildings and fluorescent lighting. Few street lights. Lots of Dim Sum. Maybe overboard to say a dutch version of Blade Runner…but something almost to this effect. And In fact I wasn’t so off, visiting the International Film Festival Rotterdam for the first time, I was struck immediately by the effect WWII clearly had on the city. All buildings with the exception of a few, being new. And then the brightness of the festival itself, which in it’s program this year felt so bold I couldn’t help but wonder if the cities history had some energetic effect. Rotterdam, unequivocally- takes chances and the impact this has on it’s attendees, be it visiting filmmakers or locals, felt like magic.

A city of light

As Long As It Takes is a good example. This particular section in the festival, highlights films which don’t fit perfectly into traditional, short or feature length sections. As a result, there’s a unique opportunity to watch films chosen more exclusively on their quality than anything else.

Cindy Jansen’s film, Auld Lang Synge which runs only 48 minutes would have been a shame to miss had it been for reasons of time alone.

Among the shorts of which were many great films, four stood out especially:

Gustavo Vinagre’s, Nova Dubai , Anita Delaney’s You Me and It, Rachel Rose’s Minute Ago, A and Alexandre Larose’s brouillard – passage #14. Within this, you had shorts in competition. Terence Nance, (an IFP alum) premiered a new work, Swimming in Your Skin Again alongside Roy Villevoye’s 22 minute Voice Over. This program in particular, encompassed work from 10 different countries and was perhaps of all the sections, the most visually eclectic.

IFFR+ which defines itself as “surprising extras” was indeed that. Aaron Naar’s Mateo (soon to be released on VOD later this year) had only one but very special screening accompanied by two vintage Scopitones (what I would characterize as the old school Youtube…if Youtube was made up of 16mm film and was encased in a wooden jukebox). Ie: the dopest thing ever. Somehow.

Bright Future, a section also not to have missed- included works that were in one way or another, about the future, the questions at play and its relationship to the present. Amanda Rose Wilder’s beautiful film, Approaching The Elephant was up there along with Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court. Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake (not officially in this section, more something unto itself – also on Youtube) is still with me a week later. And I would be wrong not to mention Kevin Jerome Everson’s eight hour film, Park Lanes which was in a section all unto itself.

Dreams Come True @ The American+Canadian Dim Sum Lunch Hosted by IFFR

Whether you make things as a filmmaker, an artist, a mechanic…there’s always a dream, a desire that the powers that be, have equal interest, equal desire to take chances for the better. The selection of work which I had the privilege of seeing at the 44th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam was exactly this.

My thoughts in one word: excellent. Or in two words: totally righteous.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s short Stop premiered at the just-concluded 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up for digital distribution by Condé Nast. Jed Weintrob, Vice President and Head of Production Condé Nast Entertainment told Indiewire in a statement: “We’re thrilled to introduce viewers to wildly impressive …]]>

Photo courtesy of Reinaldo Green

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s short Stop premiered at the just-concluded 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up for digital distribution by Condé Nast. Jed Weintrob, Vice President and Head of Production Condé Nast Entertainment told Indiewire in a statement: “We’re thrilled to introduce viewers to wildly impressive new talents such as Topaz Adizes, Ben Aston and Reinaldo Marcus Green—and it is a validation of our faith that the world of independent film is key to delivering remarkable original content to our audiences.” Green, an IFP alum, graciously documented his recent whirlwind Sundance experience for the IFP Blog.

— Erik Luers

A typical Sundance day:

- Wake up at 7:00 am.

- Ride the Park City Theater Loop shuttle next to someone who might produce your next film.

- See a fabulous screening and an even better Q&A.

- Get a free coffee at the Airbnb house.

- Dine with friends for lunch.

- Catch another midday screening.

- Attend a happy hour that bleeds into another happy hour.

- Sprint to another screening.

- Attend the Q&A of your own film.

- Cobble together dinner from the various finger food parties.

- Wind up at some random place after haven been rejected from the door of the party you were supposed to originally attend (and one that you rsvp’d for) but they ran out of space.

- The good news is that random party has another producer who wants to make your next movie.

- So all in all, I’d say pretty good days.

Accommodations:

- Our crew holed up in a very small, tremendously overpriced hut near main street, but we don’t regret the price or the experience. We shared floors and couches, but we had a hot tub, so I’d say we made out alright.

Photo courtesy of Reinaldo Green

Personal Highlights:

- After the Q&A of our first screening in Salt Lake City, a mother came up to me crying and said “Thank you. Thank you for making this film. I have a teenage son, and that could’ve been him. I worry about him every day.” The reaction stayed with me the whole week.

- Selling our film to Condé Nast!

- Park City High School Screening of Stop — this was the single most exciting event of the festival. We screened Stop for an audience of high school students. It was truly wonderful to receive such raw and uncanny feedback. I have about 300 sticky notes from students about my film, mostly all positive, so I’ll take that.

- Director’s Brunch – Here I met Robert Redford, shook his hand, and chatted briefly about how he started his career in theater in New York City.

CineMart has always had a focus on producers who are taking the first steps of their careers. Several years ago, the CineMart staff realised that many new producers lack the knowledge on how to operate in an international film festival or market setting. Consequently, in 2001, based on the belief …]]>

CineMart has always had a focus on producers who are taking the first steps of their careers. Several years ago, the CineMart staff realised that many new producers lack the knowledge on how to operate in an international film festival or market setting. Consequently, in 2001, based on the belief that these skills are vital for any producer, CineMart decided to provide young professionals the means to develop an international network by organzing the first CineMart International Trainee Project, later renamed the Rotterdam Lab. — www.iffr.com

It’s ironic that I’m sitting alone as I type this – as the 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam swirls all around me. This is a festival, a market, and an experience, that is completely built around interacting and talking to people from all corners of the world, who all want to talk about my favorite subject – cinema.

It’s either Day 3 or 4 (the days are starting to blur together, the way that they seem to at all major film festivals) of the Rotterdam Labs. I’m here as 1 of 58 delegates from around the world (sponsored by the wonderful folks at IFP) talking about making, marketing, and distributing films.

For me, the real power of the program is how easy it is to create an atmosphere of interaction. Guests, filmmakers, panelists, delegates – we’re all invited to the same events and we’re all part of the same happy hours and parties. We’re all included in the same goings-on of a major international festival, and what that creates are more meaningful discussions and in-depth conversations. Rather than a one-off dialogue with a festivalgoer I may never see again, I’m constantly among people who I’ve spoken with very recently. So, unless you want to hole up in a corner (as I’ve done now), you’re constantly surrounded by people you’ve already met and know – and the conversations flow in such a wonderfully easy way.

Yes, I am tired, and yes, I’ve made a whole slew of new contacts and friends that I hope to collaborate with in one way or another for years to come. But now I’m re-energized and excited by the possibilities ahead. Now I got to get back to talking about sasquatches, infidelity, conspiracy theories, and damsels in distress (just some of the key ingredients of new projects I’m putting together).

The documentary community converged in Queens this past Wednesday at the Museum of the Moving Image for the 8th Annual Cinema Eye Honors. In the days leading up to the ceremony, this year’s nominees were treated to a surprise Manhattan bus tour led by none other than Speed Levitch of …]]>

As the lights dimmed, the Voice of God welcoming the nominees and attendees was none other than Sarah Koenig, the creator of mega-hit documentary podcast Serial. The evening’s master of ceremonies was the artist behind another one of the year’s most unique documentaries: Sam Green, director of The Measure of All Things.

Now a fixture in the documentary community, the Cinema Eye Honors has proven itself to be a casual yet inspiring celebration of the year in documentary filmmaking, highlighting work that most other industry-heavy awards shows have likely never heard of. As Laura Poitras (whose film CITIZENFOUR picked up four awards) pointed out, nine years ago the Academy Award shortlist failed to recognize “not two or three of the best documentaries of the year, but all of them.”

In stark contrast to 2013’s behemoth, lengthy ceremony, this year’s moved along at a rapid pace. The first awards, presented by Poitras and Steve James (Life, Itself), went to Finding Vivian Maier (Debut Documentary), Jodorowsky’s Dune and Spotlight on Documentaries alumnus Particle Fever (Outstanding Achievement for Graphic Design), and The Lions Mouth Opens went to Lucy Walker for her brilliant short film. Another IFP alumnus, 1971 by Johanna Hamilton, took home this year’s Spotlight Award.

The evening took a turn toward audience interactivity when Sam Green plucked a member of the audience to present the Audience Award. After Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Creative Director Judith Helfand turned him down, she asked the man sitting next to him to do the honors. That man it so happened was, once again, one of the great documentary characters, Speed Levitch, who bounded up to the stage as Sam Green cried, “he’s real!” The motor-mouthed Levitch proclaimed documentaries to be “the most fabulous multi-vitamins” before presenting Keep On Keepin’ On with this year’s Audience Award.

Even more legendary was the evening’s final presenters: Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker. Trading nostalgic stories of meeting their wives thanks to their involvement in the filmmaking community, the duo presented the Best Feature award to the much-deserving CITIZENFOUR. Despite Poitras’ film being a sure-fire Oscar nominee, few award shows can claim to be as disinterested in the awards-season circuit as the Cinema Eye Honors. It’s an evening to celebrate the community as a whole. As Albert Maysles put it, “at the core of it all…making documentaries is the process of making friends.” Click here for a full list of this year’s winners.

Although father may not always know best, Goodbye to All That’s heartfelt and humorous look at a middle-age dad who, after an unpleasant divorce, is quickly thrown into a world of new opportunities (of the female variety) and struggles (concerns for his kin), proves that he most certainly tries. Director …]]>

Although father may not always know best, Goodbye to All That’s heartfelt and humorous look at a middle-age dad who, after an unpleasant divorce, is quickly thrown into a world of new opportunities (of the female variety) and struggles (concerns for his kin), proves that he most certainly tries. Director Angus MacLachlan, known in the film world for writing the Academy Award-nominated Junebug and Robert De Niro starrer Stone, makes his directorial debut here, proving that he has quite an assured approach to getting the best out of his actors; he guidesthem to strong performances that are equally realistic and morosely funny (his lead, Paul Schneider, won the 2014 Best Actor Award at the Tribeca Film Festival). As the film gets set to open, I spoke with MacLachlan about what lead him to the directing chair and just how much of a collaborative effort goes into the filmmaking process. The film is currently playing at the IFC Center and is available On Demand.

— Erik Luers

IFP: What lead you to Goodbye to All That, your directorial debut? As a screenwriter, had you often been on set for your previous films? Is that how you “caught the bug?”

MacLachlan: I’ve been on the set of all the films I’ve written. I was first educated as an actor, and then was a playwright and screenwriter for a number of years (I also directed for the stage a lot). It was something that I always wanted to do, and my directorial debut came about when I offered my screenplay to Phil Morrison, the director of Junebug. He said “Angus, the central emotional component of your film is the father-daughter relationship, and I don’t have children, but you do. I think you should direct it.” I then gave it to another friend, who is also a director, and he said the same thing. Eventually, I spoke to my producers and they asked who I wanted to direct the film. I said that I wanted someone as good as Phil [Morrison], but if we couldn’t get him, then I was interested in doing it myself. They thought about it, came back, and said “well, let’s see if we can try and do that.”

Having now directed a feature, do you see filmmaking as more of a collaborative process? While you also wrote the screenplay for the film, this is your first time working with a cinematographer, editor, etc. Do you find yourself thinking more about how to do things like a scene transition, when to employ a dissolve, when to fade to black, etc.?

MacLachlan: Oh yeah. You know, as a screenwriter, that’s one of the frustrating things. Not only did I have aspirations to direct, but as an actor and a Visual Arts major in school, I had a real idea of how I think things should be played in a scene. I had a great editor on this project, Jennifer Lilly, who I sat beside everyday and we’d say “let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s move this around…” I loved that collaboration. That was a fantastic aspect of directing and was one of the things I enjoyed the most, considering directing was the scariest thing I’d ever done! I was so scared. [laughs]

How important is casting then? Do you direct and edit to the strength of the performance?

MacLachlan: We had a great casting director, Mark Bennett, and I loved the cast we came up with. But it really did show to me, being in the editing room, how vulnerable performances on film are. You can really, really create a performance in the editing room. You can make someone look much worse than they normally are or much better than they normally are. You can really create moments that work well, in the act of playing, by how long you cut back-and-forth between two actors. That was amazing to me. Film actors have to really throw themselves into the dark and have to trust their director that something good will come from it. It’s why a lot of times people go, “I don’t understand. That actor was so good in that movie and yet so terrible in this other one!” That happens a lot, and as an actor, you’re really at the mercy of the elements chosen by the director.

You had mentioned that you are a father yourself, so I’d like to ask how Goodbye to All That came to be. It feels inspired by the films of Robert Benton, with situations at times reminiscent of Benton’s Kramer VS Kramer. It’s rare to see a father’s side of this story.

MacLachlan: Well, I’m not divorced, but I do have one daughter (like Otto does in the film). It came about because a lot of my friends had gone through breakups like this, and I started to takes notes about their experiences. They would tell me stories that were harrowing and funny and neurotic and exciting and really sad, and all the while, I kept taking notes. And you’re right, this is sort of a slightly funnier version of Kramer VS Kramer. Another inspiration was An Unmarried Woman from 1978, a film that focuses on a mother learning how to stand on her own two feet. I wanted to see if you could tell that story from a man’s perspective. It’s not that Otto is immature, but rather that he’s unconscious and has to have his consciousness raised. When An Unmarried Woman came out, it was about the feminist movement and about raising the female consciousness to say that “if a man can do it, then I can do it too.” I think there are a lot of men who don’t know what’s going on, don’t pay attention, and need to have their consciousness raised.
Why did you choose to set the film in North Carolina? I know your lead actor, Paul Schneider, is from there, but do you share any history with the state?

MacLachlan: That’s where I’m from and I still live there. The film is shot in my hometown, and there’s actually a lot of North Carolinans in the film. Amy Sedaris is from Raleigh and Heather Lawless, who plays Lara, is from Cherokee. And Anna Camp is from South Carolina, so there’s a lot of connections.

The film encompasses a very distinct, classical piano score throughout the film. It feels perfectly right for the setting. Could you speak about working with a composer?

MacLachlan: All of the music is actually heightened piano concertos. Early on, when I was first imagining directing the film, I knew I wanted music and I knew that I didn’t want pop music. I really couldn’t afford that and I think it’s a real cliche now. There’s something about heightened piano concertos that really felt like the character of Otto. There’s a certain out of control element to them, like silent comedians, and I feel like Otto is somewhat out of control at certain points in his life. The music is also in the public domain. I had to fight for them a lot. A lot of people said that it wasn’t going to work and that we need other music in there, and yet there’s something interesting about the formality of the classical music that we used and this story.

The film begins with Otto competing in a track competition, and subsequently throughout the film we are exposed to a tracking shot of him running and having to deal with an injury he had sustained earlier in the film. Was it important to create a physical distinction for the character? It’s such a recurring motif to keep going back to that injury as Otto’s personal experiences get tougher.

MacLachlan: Absolutely. It was one of my intentions to make Otto an athlete and particularly a runner, because runners are trained not to pay attention to pain. They are supposed to run through their pain, sometimes to the detriment of their bodies and thus hurting themselves more. That’s who Otto is. He doesn’t pay attention to his pain. I mean, something has been wrong in his marriage for quite a while that he had not paying attention to. I wanted him to have an injury, his Achilles Heel, that he keeps trying to run past and yet it’s still there. He loses to a woman — an older woman, at that — in the last scene of him running (whereas he won the first race we see him in). There’s a real key there that was intentional for me, to physicalize it. He’s going to have this injury and this scar forever, and it’s very much like divorce. You’re going to live with it forever and you can never get away from it, especially if you’re a parent.

The film really captures the joy of being single again and being able to flirt with someone privately online, whether it be thru dating websites or on Facebook. It also documents the pain of finding out (via social media) that your wife has been doing much more than just flirting. Much of the excitement and pain apparent is derived simply from the camera’s attention to Schneider’s face. How do you shoot a compelling scene involving an actor, one-on-one, without another physical presence there?

MacLachlan: The scenes that you’re talking about, where Otto finds out that his wife is cheating on him, were interesting because it’s all very clearly written out in the script. It’s written that he has trouble remembering his wife’s Facebook password, finally remembers it, discovers her secret, and then gets upset. But when we shot it, it got very interesting. I would say his character’s thoughts while he was performing them. It’s something that we both came up with. I would say “oh, what’s her password again? God, I thought I remembered it…..oh yeah, that’s it! Wait, what is that? Oh fuck!” I was standing beside the camera saying Otto’s thoughts, which was something that Paul really wanted. And in regard to the phone conversations featured in the film, we shot them separately. Some actors like to have an actual person, or the other actor, feeding him the lines when we’re just shooting one side. Paul didn’t want that. In the big scene where he and the character of Lara are talking on the phone, we didn’t have our actress, Heather Lawless, read the lines, but rather our script supervisor in another room, doing the dialogue with him. When we shot Heather’s side of that conversation, Paul volunteered to hide behind the couch she’s sitting on and run the scene with her. It was a very nice thing to do, as it was his day off and he came in to do that for her.

Speaking of finding ways to shoot those telephone conversations, did you ever struggle with how to keep them lively? A phone call is not something inherently cinematic, but you make them very entertaining. A few examples include Otto talking to his friend on the phone about his marriage, as you cut to his friend on the other line, a nonchalant grade school principal with students sluggishly sitting in his office. I’m also reminded of the last phone call in the film, between Otto and his daughter, which is unique because we’re only shown Otto….

MacLachlan: You know, that was something I didn’t even realize until we were shooting. Whenever Otto talks to his daughter, you don’t hear her. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Most of the other phone conversations in the film feature both people on the phone. That’s again a testament to Paul’s acting. That last conversation in the film was done completely on his own. There’s one other conversation in the film, where he calls up Lara and asks her to come over, that Paul did completely by himself. It is a curious thing, to keep a phone conversation alive in a movie. The big conversation between Lara and Paul features the two characters in separate rooms. Sometimes when you see movies with people on the phone, you think “this is boring! I want to see the two people together,” but I don’t feel that it’s boring here, because of the performances and the length of the scene.

The film also has some fun with the very religious (one character is hypersexualized and yet has to consult her Bible afterward because she feels guilty about her urges). And yet, by having Otto’s daughter interested in church as well, perhaps it’s not all antagonistic.

MacLachlan: Religion is a funny thing to present sincerely. I don’t know if it’s particularly regional, but we had a lot of religion in Junebug too and a lot of people noticed it. I’m not religious, but it’s something that’s in a lot of people’s lives (and a lot of people I know’s lives). Children of Otto’s daughter’s age start to ask about God, and if they don’t go to church, they’re wondering why they’re not. The daughter sees her father getting hurt all the time and wonders what kind of God would do that. Because of this, she wants to talk to the female minister. And in regard to Debbie Spangler [the hypersexualized character previously mentioned], I don’t think her problem is that she’s religious, but that she’s a little bit bipolar. That’s the problem. She has overpowering feelings that get away from her every once in a while.

When you’re directing a scene, do you think about genre at all? I’m thinking of the scene with the therapist, where she explains to Otto, in front of his wife, that his marriage is over. It’s very funny due to the awkward humility of the situation, but it’s also somewhat sad and tragic.

MacLachlan: I don’t really think in that way. I’ve heard this film described in so many different ways, whether by calling it a dramedy, or a comedy, or a drama, or a romantic comedy. I just think that life is funny and sad at the same time. It can be horrifying too. I think it has all of these mixtures and I enjoy films that are like that and have those elements.

A reputable distributor should be willing to accept terms that protect a filmmaker’s interests. Many such provisions do not cost the distributor anything as long as the distributor lives up to the terms of its contract. A provision for interest on late payments, for example, costs the distributor nothing as …]]>

A reputable distributor should be willing to accept terms that protect a filmmaker’s interests. Many such provisions do not cost the distributor anything as long as the distributor lives up to the terms of its contract. A provision for interest on late payments, for example, costs the distributor nothing as long as payments are made on time. Such provisions are important because they encourage a distributor to live up to its commitments, and provide the filmmaker with a viable remedy in case the distributor defaults. Here is a list of some of the most critical ways for filmmakers to protect their interests.

This list should not be considered exhaustive. There are other items a filmmaker may want to include such as clauses dealing with advances, guarantees and reservation of rights.

NO CHANGES: The film should not be edited, nor the title changed, without the filmmaker’s approval. Editing for censorship purposes, television broadcast and changes made for a foreign release, such as translating the title, is permissible.

MINIMUM ADVERTISING SPECIFIED: The contract should specify in writing the minimum amount the distributor will spend on advertising and promotion of the film. The distributor should make a commitment to pay for the creation of a poster, one-sheet and trailer if these items have not been created.

EXPENSES LIMITED: There should be a floor and a ceiling on expenses. Market expenses (the cost to attend film markets) should be limited to the first year of release and capped per market. Promotional expenses should be limited to direct out-of-pocket costs spent to promote the film and should specifically exclude the distributor’s general overhead and staff expenses.

TERM: The term should be a reasonable length, perhaps up to ten years, but not in perpetuity. The filmmaker should be able to regain rights to the film if the distributor gives up on it. Thus, it is best to have a short initial term, such as two years, and a series of automatic rollovers if the distributor returns a certain amount of revenue to the filmmaker. If these performance milestones are not met, all rights would automatically revert to the filmmaker.

INDEMNITY: Filmmaker should be indemnified (receive reimbursement) for any losses incurred by filmmaker as a result of distributor’s breach of the terms of the agreement, violation of third party rights, and for any changes or additions made to the film.

POSSESSION OF NEGATIVE: Distributor should receive a lab access letter rather than possession of the original negative and other original elements. Distributor should not be permitted to remove masters from the laboratory.

ERRORS AND OMISSIONS (E&O) POLICY: While it is generally the filmmaker’s responsibility to purchase an E & O insurance policy, distributors are often willing to advance the cost of this insurance and recoup the cost from gross revenues. In such an event, the filmmaker should be added as an additional named insured on the policy.

TERMINATION CLAUSE: If the distributor defaults on its contractual obligations, filmmaker should have the right to terminate the contract, and regain rights to license the film in unsold territories as well as obtain money damages for the default. Filmmaker should give distributor fourteen days prior written notice of default before exercising the right to termination.

RIGHT TO INSPECT BOOKS AND RECORDS: Distributor should maintain complete books and records with regard to all sales and rental of the film. Filmmaker should receive quarterly (or monthly) producer statements with any payment due filmmaker. Filmmaker should have the right to examine the books and records of distributor during reasonable business hours on ten days notice.

LATE PAYMENTS/LIEN: All monies due and payable to filmmaker should be held in trust by distributor for filmmaker. Filmmaker should be deemed to have a lien on filmmaker’s share of revenue. Distributor should pay filmmaker interest on any amounts past due.

LIMITATION ON ACTION: Filmmaker should have at least three years from receipt of any financial statement, or discovery of any accounting irregularity, whichever is later, to contest accounting errors and file a Demand for Arbitration.

ASSIGNMENT: It is best to prohibit assignment unless Filmmaker consents. If assignment is permitted, Distributor should not be relieved of its obligations under the original contract.

FILMMAKER DEFAULT: Distributor should give Filmmaker fourteen days written notice of any alleged default by filmmaker, and an additional ten days to cure such default, before taking any action to enforce its rights.

WARRANTIES: Filmmaker’s warranties in regard to infringement of third party rights should be to the best of the filmmaker’s knowledge and belief, not absolute.

SCHEDULE OF MINIMUMS: For distributors who license foreign rights (known as foreign sales agents) there should be a schedule of minimum acceptable license fees per territory. The distributor is not permitted to license the film in each territory for less than the minimum without the prior approval of the Filmmaker.

ARBITRATION CLAUSE: Every contract should contain an arbitration clause ensuring that all contractual disputes are subject to binding arbitration with the prevailing party entitled to reimbursement of legal fees and costs. The arbitration award should be final, binding and non-appealable. IFTA will now arbitrate entertainment industry disputes involving non-IFTA companies. The IFTA personal guarantee Rider can be used to bar a company’s chief executive from attending future American Film Markets if the company refuses to pay an arbitration award.

If you haven’t heard, collective: unconscious, a new web series providing a look into the dreams of the filmmakers creating it, is set to premiere in the summer of 2015. If the name of collective: unconscious’ creator, Dan Schoenbrun, sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that. Dan previously served as Associate Director of …]]>

If you haven’t heard, collective: unconscious, a new web series providing a look into the dreams of the filmmakers creating it, is set to premiere in the summer of 2015. If the name of collective: unconscious’ creator, Dan Schoenbrun, sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that. Dan previously served as Associate Director of Programming here at IFP, working with the organization for five years and becoming an integral part of the team. He was a strong champion for web series during his tenure, helping to launch the Web Series sidebar in our Emerging Storytellers program in 2014 and providing this very website with one of its most popular blog posts: “Why Web Series Matter.”

Dan has since moved on to serve as Film Partnerships Lead at Kickstarter, and now he’s launching his first ever campaign. Assembling a group of filmmakers that have been making waves throughout the independent film world — Lily Baldwin, Frances Bodomo, Daniel Carbone, Josephine Decker, and Lauren Wolkstein — the project is, as Dan notes on the campaign page, “a five-episode collaborative web series where each episode will be directed by one of the filmmakers, adapting a dream that another one has had.” If you have a few minutes, check out the campaign (and its featured video announcing the project’s goals in a very humorous presentation) and then read the following interview. I spoke with Dan and participating filmmakers Lily Baldwin, Daniel Carbone and Lauren Wolkstein about how they got involved with the project, how they interpret dreams, and what kinds of exciting plans they have in preparing for the unknown.

— Erik Luers

IFP: How did this project come about? Had you all worked with each other in the past?

Schoenbrun: Much of this project, from meeting these people to coming up with the idea for it, came out of IFP. I spent five years at IFP, and those years were truly formative years for me. It was formative in terms of developing an understanding of what the industry was and in terms of meeting and building relationships into incredible and amazing work. IFP is an organization that has such an emphasis on pushing the conversation forward in terms of the realities of the film world and the stress points that filmmakers feel along the journey. The project came out of everything I learned from Amy [Dotson], Milton [Tabbot] and Joana [Vicente] and everyone at IFP. It started many years ago as a general idea of what could be a fun project. As I started to make it a reality, it all started from what I learned from working there.

Wolkstein: I first met Dan several years ago through IFP. My project was selected to be in the Emerging Storytellers section for Independent Film Week. We have remained friends ever since, and he’s been one of the most supportive and encouraging people in my life. So thank you IFP for introducing us, and thank you Dan for supporting my work. Dan later approached me to direct one of the films in his new web series where we would adapt another filmmakers’ dreams. He mentioned the other filmmakers that he was considering, and I jumped at the opportunity to work with such amazing talents.

Baldwin: Dan and I have been going back-and-forth online for a couple of years now. We just recently connected much more personally with my feature-film Glass, which was chosen for IFP’s Independent Film Week in 2014. The rest is history. I love what Dan stands for and what he’s trying to do. One night we were hashing out some ideas and Dan shared some thoughts about a project centered around dreams. I come from a dance background, but now also work in film, and it fit right into the areas that I was interested in. It made perfect sense and I was really excited.

Carbone: I first met Dan back in 2012 for the IFP Narrative Labs with my film, Hide Your Smiling Faces. Dan was one of the people who seemed to really respond to the film at IFP. We got along really well and stayed in touch. One of the things that had a real lasting impact on me, as someone just getting into features and wondering if it was a world in which I belonged, was when Dan told me that I’d be great and that I should stay on course. That’s important to hear when you’re trying to figure out if what it is you’ve been doing the past few years was really worthwhile. I was really excited when he asked me about this new project. I would’ve come on board with whatever he had in mind, but I was especially happy when he pitched this idea. It came at a really great time. I’ve wanted to get started on my second feature, but I don’t have anything ready to go right now. It’s a great opportunity to try some things that I may not have been willing to try in a feature. Being able to take a risk and not being afraid to fail isn’t something we get to do very often. Also, I love that content on the web is becoming much more relevant now. I’ve always loved shorts but didn’t know how they could be distributed or how people could see it. I’m really excited for this collaboration.

In terms of crowdfunding, how important is the creation of an introductory video when crafting a campaign like this? Did all of the participating filmmakers have a say in how it was created?

Schoenbrun: I would have loved that video to have been something the six of us directed together. It just wasn’t possible, partly because we’re stationed all over the world right now. Lauren Wolkstein helped and essentially ghost-directed the Kickstarter video with me in it. It was, however, a total collaboration in terms of the vibe we were aiming for with the project. I don’t know if you noticed, but there are these little Easter Eggs that we drop into the video, such as pictures of all five of the filmmakers sleeping. We tried to make something that will emphasize the collaboration.

Carbone: I’m obsessed with the video. Everyone did an amazing job and it really worked to show how we’re still discovering what the project is. The darkly comic tone is really appropriate.

After your dreams have been written down, they will be placed into a hat, and Dan will subsequently select the dreams to assign to you. This will be totally randomized. What’s it like agreeing to a project in which you’re not entirely sure of what it is you’re going to be creating?

Carbone: That’s my favorite part! It goes along with the idea of not being allowed to overthink things and work from instinct. I love this idea of not knowing what you’re going to do. As we keep talking about this project and we’re getting closer and closer to starting and putting some pieces together (where we might shoot, who we might collaborate with, etc.), we still don’t know what our dream is going to be until we go into production. We’re working from instinct and that goes along with the whole theme of dreams. We don’t have much control over what we experience in our dreams, and when we wake up, we remember what we have and fill in the gaps for ourselves. I’m a big fan of the work of our other collaborators, and I think they’re going to be very unique and make for five very different projects.

Schoenbrun: There’s a reason I wanted to withhold the dreams from the filmmakers until right before they go into production. If they knew what their short was going to be before they went into making it, it’d be almost impossible for the filmmaker to not start thinking about the shooting schedule and things like that. But if they knew the budget they had to work with and then get their assigned dream, that changes a lot.

Baldwin: I trust all of the collaborators on this project. I have no doubt that this off-the-cuff approach will be rigorous and I’ll be pushed into a corner. This opportunity to just play is an authentic inquisition. It’s not about reaching and communicating as much as it’s about exploring impulses.

Your segment could range from thirty seconds to thirty minutes. Does the lack of a strict length requirement also give you free range?

Baldwin: I love the idea of beginning with the confinements. Working with a small budget is very exciting, and giving myself even less to work with to see how much risk I can take is something I’m very interested in.

Wolkstein:I’m very excited by any project that encourages experimentation with form. We must take risks as filmmakers and this is a project that is asking us to make bold and original choices. What is there not to love about it? I am thrilled to be asked to experiment and to join this engaging, creative community of artists. I’m also really excited to be a part of the social collective experience.

Carbone: I have a basic concept for a lot of the things that I want do, but sometimes I’m not sure it’s a short story, a short film, a documentary or something else. That’s what I always get hung up on. What is it that I’m trying to make? I really like when the non-creative aspects are given to me. It frees me up to not have to do think about those kinds of things. I love that that’s been taken care of, the packaging of it. I know the general size of what I’ll be doing and I know how people are going to watch it, for the most part. That frees me up to not have to worry about if it’s going to play on large screens of if it will play on people’s phones. While it may still play on both of those, it’s nice to have a general guideline on where these things will be and how they will exist. It allows us to focus on the creative side.

Baldwin: It feels like art for art’s sake. It reminds me of the 1960s collaborative work between John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

Carbone: It reminds me of when I was younger, where I would pick up a camera and see what happens and not worry about if it was accessible, if a certain audience would be interested in a certain kind of content. Let’s see what kind of amazing stuff we can put out there.

You have one backer who is entitled to a fifteen minute Skype session with a participating filmmaker of his or her choosing. If chosen, what type of advice could you offer them?

Baldwin: (Laughs) I think I’ll only know what I could offer when I’m sitting across from them and looking into their eyes. It would echo what this project is about. I’d want to propagate risk and experimentation.

A theatrical premiere is preemptively set for the summer of 2015. Is it strictly a one-night event, or do you see a theatrical life for the project going forward?

Schoenbrun: Before we launched the campaign, we had a big conversation about this with the entire team. We can’t really make a decision about what our distribution strategy will be until we know what our emphasis will be. We can’t really know what our emphasis will be until we know what our budget is. We want the release strategy to be different, to be strange, to be totally in line with what the project itself is. Until we have our budget, we won’t know if we’re looking at thirty minutes of episodes or three hours of episodes, you know? We’ll look at what we have and then do something that involves the audience and involves doing something more than just watching the episodes. The intention for the world premiere is for the filmmakers to find out, on that night, whose dream they were adapting and then watch their own dream. No matter what we do, an essential part of the process is to see the filmmakers reacting to their own dream and having a discussion about the process of bringing something so ephemeral and half-forgotten into reality and onto the screen.

collective: unconscious is a project on Kickstarter with three weeks left to go in its campaign. To learn more about the project and contribute to making it come to fruition, click here.

]]>http://www.ifp.org/resources/sleep-no-more-the-creative-team-behind-collective-unconscious-discuss-their-dream-inspired-collaboration/feed/0Documenting the New Media Uprising: Andrew Napier on “Mad as Hell” and The Young Turkshttp://www.ifp.org/resources/documenting-the-new-media-uprising-andrew-napier-on-mad-as-hell-and-the-young-turks/
http://www.ifp.org/resources/documenting-the-new-media-uprising-andrew-napier-on-mad-as-hell-and-the-young-turks/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 19:07:23 +0000http://www.ifp.org/?p=21441

I’ve been a fan of The Young Turks, an online news show that currently has well over 1.5 billion views on Youtube, for approximately five years now. Created and co-hosted by Cenk Uygur, an eccentric, hard-hitting and humorous figure who gives off the feeling of both a leader and an …]]>

I’ve been a fan of The Young Turks, an online news show that currently has well over 1.5 billion views on Youtube, for approximately five years now. Created and co-hosted by Cenk Uygur, an eccentric, hard-hitting and humorous figure who gives off the feeling of both a leader and an old friend, The Young Turks’ daily news program is as informative as it is fun. Neither a left nor right-wing pulpit for recycled talking points, every media personality and political figure is fair game; Bill Maher, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Kim Kardashian, and Barack Obama are often granted equal flack when necessary. Covering the media stories of the day with the entertainment kerfuffles of the moment, The Young Turks works best as an arena for interesting, uninterrupted conversation. Conflicting points-of-view are presented, debates occur between the co-hosts, and occasionally a laugh or two can be had. Each segment is given ample amounts of time to evaluate and dissect the subject at hand. If you have a few minutes, give some of their segments a watch here.

Mad as Hell, the first feature-length documentary on The Young Turks, is being distributed in North America by Oscilloscope Laboratories & theatrically via Gathr Films. It’s already toured the festival circuit to much success — it won the Conscious Media Award at the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto — and the strong word-of-mouth is well warranted. It’s an informative film that provides insider access and behind-the-scenes footage that only someone involved with the company could obtain. As it gets set to make its New York debut on November 24th, I spoke with documentary filmmaker Andrew Napier (himself a longtime member of the Young Turks community) about how he became involved with The Young Turks, taking a stab at traditional media, his ventures into crowdfunding, and the difficulty of getting an independent film distributed.

— Erik Luers

Before we begin, I hear you’re working on a remake of Dogtooth (the 2009 Greek film from director Yorgos Lanthimos)? That’s pretty awesome.

Napier: That’s nice of you to say. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m lucky to be involved in it. It’s a challenging script to adapt for American audiences. But I love the original film by Yorgos, as it’s a beautiful film and an incredible work of art. It’s got very a strong following, and if our remake happens, I think some people are going to hate me for doing it! But the learning experience and challenge has been worth it.

IFP: Were you familiar with The Young Turks before you started shooting Mad As Hell? How did you get involved with the company and in making this film?

Napier: I’m originally from Wisconsin and I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker. That’s always been my main passion. Back in 2008, I was going to UW-Madison and I wasn’t feeling very fulfilled film-wise. I eventually got really lucky, and through a series of events, was able to go to Los Angeles and meet Quentin Tarantino. I was invited onto the set of Inglorious Basterds in Berlin [Andrew was an extra in the film playing a Nazi and working as a production assistant and intern]. Tarantino told me to move to Los Angeles to keep making movies, and I did. I dropped out of UW-Madison, packed up my car and drove to Los Angeles from Wisconsin. Once I arrived, I had to accomplish two things: I had to make a living to be able to stay in LA, and I wanted to win my parents support back, as they were a little sore for me dropping out of school. They were still supportive, of course, but they were thinking I’d move out there for a few months months, run out of money, and then I’d come crawling back to Wisconsin and return to school.

My dad and brother were both really big fans of this weird online show called The Young Turks. My dad could never pronounce Cenk Uygur’s name, but he was so interested in this guy and what he had to say. I found out that TYT was based out of LA, so I went in and started working as an intern, which eventually led to a full time job directing, producing, and editing for TYT. My parents were excited about it and the possibility of a potential job.

But I was out in LA to make movies, not work a 9 to 5 for a news show, as much as I did like working for them. I thought Cenk was such an interesting character, and so I asked him at the end of my first week what he would think about me doing a documentary about him and filming behind-the-scenes of The Young Turks. Cenk told me, “I always wanted to have a documentary made about me!” I then started filming but didn’t know how the documentary would be shaped. I didn’t know what would happen with their eventual success on Youtube, their experiences with MSNBC and Current TV, or anything. I was very lucky to be there with a camera rolling.

Did you pursue other film projects when you worked for The Young Turks? Napier: I worked for TYT for about 3 years, then Curfew [a film produced by Napier that won the Academy Award for Best Short Film, Live Action in 2013] happened. That was an incredible experience, and soon after I was able to make filmmaking my full time job. Between leaving TYT a couple years ago and now, I have worked on 6 feature films, 4 shorts, and sold one screenplay. But even after leaving TYT I kept coming back to film for Mad As Hell, as the story was constantly evolving.

Did you want the film to be a biopic of Cenk? Or did it eventually become an encompassing presentation of The Young Turks as a whole? We see photos of Cenk as a child, following him all the way to adulthood where he sees his name literally up in lights in Time Square. Is it an individual’s rags-to-riches story or a portrait of The Young Turks?

Napier: Yes. All that sounds good. (Laughs) It’s a story of a man who went from just wanting to have his face on camera, from pursuing this individual dream, to building a company that was a part of the Youtube/online revolution, which ironically got him involved in traditional media, where he was able to see the problems that existed. The film is about someone who shifts from his own personal success to a need to fix the system. It’s a biopic, a new media tech story, a look at corruption in politics and media in America. It’s a lot, which made editing the film difficult. But the core of the story, however, is about a man and his dreams and goals, and how they change.

You interview many of Cenk’s close acquaintances who don’t pull any punches. You speak with his family, his childhood friends (including long-time Young Turk David Koller), his former co-host Jill Pike, his law school friend who seems to be a little confused by Cenk’s success…Was it important for the film to have a honest and frank discussion about Cenk?

Napier: My conditions in doing this film was that I would own the film and have final cut. I was very grateful and impressed with Cenk and The Young Turks to allow this. It can’t be easy to be the subject of a film and not have control. I wanted to present Cenk and everyone for who they are. I didn’t want this to be a fluff piece. The film wasn’t funded or made by The Young Turks. It was made independently by myself and my team of independent filmmakers. I wanted it to be both rewarding for fans but also accessible and interesting to people who have never heard about TYT before. Really I got lucky because Cenk respected what I wanted to achieve, and I respect him for allowing it. And I got lucky with all the interviews. They were all so candid and honest because that’s who all these people at TYT are and what makes them and the show so interesting. As Dave Koller would say in the film “Cenk keeps it real… what ever the hell that means.”

There’s some great archival footage in the film that I had never seen before. Cenk on CNN in the 1990s, Cenk and Ben Mankiewicz on television in Miami…How did you find some of that great material?

Napier: Cenk made some of it very easy for me, because any time he was on TV when he was younger, his friends or family recorded it. He kept them so that he could edit the footage into clip reels so that he could find more work. There were other clips and footage I either heard about or knew existed but could not find anywhere and it took months or even years to find. Trying to find the footage of Cenk telling the guest on air to shut up, and Cenk bashing Chris Mathews, took over a year of searching and digging to locate.

In the film’s end credits, you thank over 1,000 of your Indiegogo supporters. Could you speak a little bit about the process of crowdfunding and what you needed from them?

Napier: This was right when Kickstarter and Indiegogo was starting up, before the Veronica Mars film took to the world of crowdfunding to get financed. We wound up raising approximately $70,000 for Mad As Hell from a little over a 1,000 backers. I did an interview with Indiegogo soon after we raised the money, and I had said that I was waiting for some big cult figure or icon to get into this world of crowdfunding, because they will want to raise money independent of studios and the potential would be massive for them. One month later, the Veronica Mars team launched their campaign. I knew that would change everything, and it really did. I’m very lucky that we’ve had the fanbase to help fund this film and finish it professionally.

Did you always hope for the film to receive theatrical distribution? It’s obviously very tough for documentaries, let alone narrative films, to acquire a national theatrical roll-out. Were you adamant about getting the film into theatres?

Napier: I’m a big advocate of new media, digital and online, etc. Nontraditional media is obviously what the film’s story is about. But I also love the traditional movie theater experience. It’s always better to see a movie in a packed theater, whether it be a new Star Wars or the latest Werner Herzog film, with people who really care about it. So I wanted The Young Turks’ strong community of passionate viewers to experience the film together on the big screen, and this was only solidified after we played at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.

I had so many people laugh in my face when I told them I wanted to release the film this way in theaters. After Hot Docs, I was approached by Gathr Films. They do a new model of theatrical crowdsourcing, “theatrical on-demand,” where fans can request screenings. If that screening can get enough people to pre-order a ticket (without them getting charged), then the screening is confirmed and everyone gets charged at the same time. The screening then takes place at their local movie theater. This seemed like the perfect model for our audience. We’re doing three months of exclusive theatrical on-demand Gathr screenings, starting with Los Angeles and now all over the country. Cenk and I are going to as many of them as we can.

For the screenings we’ve missed, I look online and see crowds holding posters and taking pictures together at the event. It really feels good to see groups of people coming together to have a good time and watch this film together. We’re going to do that across the country for the next few months. I guess we’re semi-traditional and semi-untraditional in how we’re doing it. Oscilloscope Laboratories, a distributor I’ve always been a big fan of, (and worked with before on The Past is a Grotesque Animal) came on board to distribute the film on all platforms like ITunes, Netflix, On Demand, TV VOD, DVD, & BLU-Ray and more. That wide release starts on February 6th. In the week before the wide release, we’ll do a one-week traditional theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York. With Gathr we wanted to allow the fans all over the country experience the film in a theater. With the traditional run we want to draw the attention of people who don’t know who The Young Turks are but might be interested in this subject matter of news and politics and Cenk’s story.

Mad As Hell screens at the Union Square Stadium 14 in Manhattan on Monday, November 24th. Tickets are available here. A wide release via Oscilloscope Laboratories will take place Feb 6th. For more information, please visit: www.MadAsHellFilm.com

Documentary filmmaker Robert Greene’s latest work, Actress, opens this Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a week-long run. A delicate character study that is both a concentrated observation of former television star Brandy Burre (The Wire) and of the role of performance in documentary storytelling, Actress is a …]]>

Documentary filmmaker Robert Greene’s latest work, Actress, opens this Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a week-long run. A delicate character study that is both a concentrated observation of former television star Brandy Burre (The Wire) and of the role of performance in documentary storytelling, Actress is a remarkable work, recently nominated for a 2014 Gotham Award for Best Documentary. Greene has been very active on social media and at festivals and conferences promoting the now critically-acclaimed film (he was a guest speaker at the Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week this year), but the sailing wasn’t always smooth.

After rocking the festival circuit at respected doc institutions like True/False, Hot Docs, and Lincoln Center’s own Art of the Real (securing a strong distributor soon after), Greene ran into some difficulties attempting to obtain affordable music rights to specific selections sampled in the film. What to do? The film was going to be opening on November 7th one way or another, but would it be the original version that had been shown to thousands of people at festivals? With a release date and theater already in tow, Grene took to the world of crowdfunding to raise the necessary funds (and in turn, awareness) needed to deliver the film untruncated. Bypassing Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Greene enlisted the services of Seed&Spark, an organization with a lower but no less respected profile that proved a perfect fit. I spoke with Greene about what led him to crowdfunding, why he chose Seed&Spark, and the humility involved in asking other people for some hard-earned cash. — Erik Luers

IFP: What were your thoughts about crowdfunding beforehand? Had you participated in it before this current foray?

Greene: This was my first time. A lot of people try to get their work crowdfunded upfront before they’ve proven that the movie is worth doing, and that’s misguided a little bit. I’ve had my issues in thinking about the process of crowdfunding. Asking for money upfront always seemed a little bit weird to me, and so I never considered it before now, before it was necessary. I was happy that we were in a different stage of our film’s life when we needed to turn that way. I was happy to be able to say “hey, this movie’s coming out and you may have heard about it and we can tell you it’s a good movie! Help us finish!”

Have much money were you attempting to raise and did you ever consider the possibilities if it didn’t come to fruition? If you weren’t able to raise the intended amount?

Greene: For us, it was a very specific thing. The way the movie has been made is that we’ve paid as we’ve gone along. We dreamed of big things but never expected big things. We didn’t have any money upfront. The production company that I work with, 4th Row Films, paid as they could. They paid for a lot of the music that is already in there. While we were never going to not be able to pay for DCPs, would we be able to get them in some kind of economically responsible way?

The biggest cost we had were these three songs in the movie that we kept attempting to negotiate the cost for. It was absolutely a possibility that we’d have to replace those songs. Obviously the film was still coming out. There wasn’t going to be anything that was going to stop the film from coming out on its release date. We did, however, want to retain what the movie was that got us there in the first place. It was definitely a possibility that we’d have to lose the songs if we couldn’t pay for them. The whole goal was to get the cost down to such a degree so that we’d feel confident going out and asking for help. When we first discussed it, the potential cost was a lot higher, and we just kept working with the record labels to find creative ways to get the costs as low as possible. That’s why it took so long for us to raise the money. We were working to make it as cheap as possible and coming up with a contingency plan in case we had to replace those songs (which is something we never wanted to do).

Why specifically Seed&Spark? Had you looked at other crowdfunding outlets?

Greene: We talked to Kickstarter and they’re great, but we went with Seed&Spark for a few reasons. The tone of the people working there and what the brand means….they’re up-and-coming in a way that felt like it was an alternative way to crowdfund. It’s like trying to sell your book at a mom-and-pop bookseller first and then trying to get into Walmart later. Kickstarter is a big brand, and it didn’t make sense for me to say “I’m kickstarting a film that’s already coming out.” Beyond that, Brandy Burre, the star of the film, myself, and 4th Row Films have several different connections with people who are at Seed&Spark. They are largely run by women and are a little bit more hands-on in terms of their service. I was texting people from the organization to make sure things were going smoothly, etc.etc. That kind of hands-on approach and the fact that they were friends and largely women running the company, all made sense in relation to what the movie is. For whatever reason, it just matched up in my mind and felt better. I’m sure Kickstarter would have done a great job, but I really liked the way Seed & Spark treated us and the way the content of the movie related to the way the company is run.

You were very active throughout the campaign. Some filmmakers will make an introductory video and then leave it at that. Your video laying out what you needed was great, featuring Alex Ross Perry, David Lowery, Sean Price Williams, and others. You then continued to release new videos, updating everyone throughout. When your previous film, Fake It So Real, was at the ReRun theater, you put out videos of filmmakers and programmers like Tom Hall (Executive Director of the Montclair Film Festival) saying “come see Fake It So Real at Rerun this week!” and doing a kind of classic wrestling promo. How crucial was it to have fun with it and to continuously update funders or potential funders on the project?

Greene: Every time I put out a video, I literally came up with the idea about five minutes before! When working on the first video, I thought about filmmakers who try to pull the sincere card. And yet, it is sincere. You sincerely want to make a movie and you sincerely want to get to that next level. A lot of times, however, that sincerity backfires; it’s just not a very fun process to watch. My goal was to make fun of myself and the whole process, because it’s a very hard process that can be very demeaning and ridiculing. It can make you feel really weird. I wouldn’t have made three or four videos if I didn’t come up with three or four ideas to make videos. If someone were to tell me “okay, you need to release one video per week,” my instinct would be to say that that’s probably not right. Unless I have an idea for a video, I’m not going to do it. It’s not clever or entertaining if it’s forced.

While Actress is a movie that has a certain tone that may not necessarily match the tone of the campaign, hopefully it’s an entertaining movie in the end. In that respect, the crowdfunding videos have to be entertaining as well, and my way of being entertaining is to make fun of myself and to look stupid. That was fun. The red dress idea (for one video, Greene donned a red dress memorably worn by Burre in the film) was basically me coming up with that concept, shooting it, and then being done with it within a twenty-five minute span. If someone had come up with that idea for me, I never would have done it. If the videos were just meant to plug in some sort of grid, such as to update it everyday, I never would have done it. The idea seemed funny enough for me to execute as fast as possible. For me, it was very important to be aware of how ridiculous you sound when trying to crowfund. If you’re aware of that and can make that part of the joke, then people can see I’m having fun with this and need the money (or else I wouldn’t be asking). The way we did our promotional videos for Fake It So Real had me embrace the self-aware, self-promotional aspect that wrestling brings to the table. That was the tone we used with Actress as well, even if Actress is such a different kind of movie. Nonetheless, self-aware self-promotion was definitely the way to go. You can’t take yourself too seriously in life and you can’t take yourself too seriously when crowdfunding.

Did that frame of mind also apply to the perks you were giving away as well? Or was that a separate plan of attack?

Greene: We were very specific about the things we were giving away. We sold tickets to the film’s opening weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Our campaign wasn’t: “hey, in some future scenario, you may see a movie….” It was: “this film is coming out from a great distributor, Cinema Guild, and we need to do ‘x’ to see the film that everyone else is excited about and here’s the date to see it if you support us.” Our pitch was a clear pitch. We also have a cool poster, so we added things like that. I’m also going to cut a short out of unused material in the film to share with contributors. You obviously hear that the perks and the prizes are a cool thing, and I totally agree. If I’m going to ask people to spend money on a crowdfunding project, I’d rather they spend it on the backend when the film’s actually done and people can see it.

Brandy Burre and yourself will be at a few of the opening weekend screenings for Q&As. Any other special guests or events lined up for this Friday and Saturday?

Greene: We’re doing Q&As after the seven o’clock screening on Friday and the seven o’clock and nine-thirty screenings on Saturday. Film critic Eric Hynes is moderating on Friday, and Lauren Sandler who recently wrote a piece on the film in The New York Times, will moderate on Saturday. She’s a journalist who has done a lot of writing about being a mother and being a woman in professional environments, so she will bring a different perspective to that screening. We also have Dan Nuxoll of Rooftop Films on hand to moderate our Saturday screening at nine-thirty. Tickets are selling pretty quickly!

Actress opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this Friday. Tickets are available here. To take a look at Greene’s crowdfunding campaign for the film, click here.

]]>http://www.ifp.org/resources/experiences-in-crowdfunding-robert-greene-and-actress/feed/0Independent Horror Cinema Returns to New York Just in Time for Halloweenhttp://www.ifp.org/resources/independent-horror-cinema-returns-to-new-york-just-in-time-for-halloween/
http://www.ifp.org/resources/independent-horror-cinema-returns-to-new-york-just-in-time-for-halloween/#commentsFri, 31 Oct 2014 15:23:59 +0000http://www.ifp.org/?p=21285

A horror film festival that dare open on Halloween night (rather than those that predictably choose to conclude on the holiday), Scary Movies, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual ode to genre fare both newly crafted and dusted off, kicks off its eighth edition with something for everyone. Programmed …]]>

A horror film festival that dare open on Halloween night (rather than those that predictably choose to conclude on the holiday), Scary Movies, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual ode to genre fare both newly crafted and dusted off, kicks off its eighth edition with something for everyone. Programmed by lovers of the macabre, the series, overseen by Film Comment’s Gavin Smith and Laura Kern, two critical voices who go the extra mile to screen the rare and neglected (a rare cut of Nightbreed played last year complete with original, VHS-quality footage intact), things uptown get gleefully horrific this time of year. Werewolves, vampires, creepo parents and more make their presence known in this seven-day schmogasboard of twisted, provocative goodness.

A hilarious mockumentary that’s chummy, good-natured narrative proves that likeable comraderies also exist in the world of the undead, What We Do in the Shadows is the latest from Flight of the Conchords collaborators Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. Very much in the vein of Christopher Guest’s gag-a-minute ensemble comedies of years past, the film delights in fish-out-of-water scenarios and an off-the-cuff repartee between its leads. We’re told, via opening title-cards, that a documentary crew has traveled to New Zealand to cover the preparation for a secretive masquerade ball. As we soon find out, the participants are a quartet of vampires, members of the pre-deceased that just want to drink blood and go out to the clubs and party hard. While they occasionally socialize with humans who bring them fresh meat in exchange for eternal life, these bachelors usually stay inside to clean, sleep, and learn about the remarkable newly discovered invention called the internet (it’s totally safe, you see, for vampires to witness a sunrise from the pixels transmuted through their computer screen). Beyond witty and substantially clever, the film tactfully uses dopey humor to prove its smarts.

Late Phases, the latest from Dark Sky Films and Glass Eye Pix (Glass Eye’s Larry Fessenden provides a cameo), is an amusing cross between a werewolf film and a geriatric display of Stand Your Ground. As a crotchety old blind war veteran gets displaced to Crescent Bay Retirement Community to live the rest of his days removed from his son’s daily life, he discovers that his new elderly neighbors seem to be dropping like flies once a month, particularly on evenings when the moon is full. Shades of Gran Torino and Scent of a Woman compliment this werewolf howler that often uses practical gore effects while making poignant points on religion (featuring the always strong Tom Noonan as a local priest) and the difficulties of parenthood.

Speaking of the difficulties of parenthood, John McNaughton’s The Harvest, starring Samantha Morton, Michael Shannon and Peter Fonda, is a film that proves that mothers and fathers don’t always know best. The less explicitly said about the plot, the better, but just know that the film stars Shannon and Morton as two parents who love their sickly son dearly, the mother almost obsessively so. As the bedridden son and his friend try to understand why the adults are keeping him confined to a bed all day (thoughts of Misery and The Secret Garden mesh and coalesce here), the film reveals its secrets in a practical fashion; rarely graphic but consistently engaging, the film announces its secrets slowly in a very satisfactory manner. Children in peril is always tough to watch.

True love is true no matter where you come across it, and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring confirms this in rather interesting fashion. Spring tells the tale of a young man who, having just lost his job and his mother to cancer, takes off to Italy to reset and start a new life. While there, he befriends both an elderly man who supplies room for work and a beautiful woman who he quickly falls head over heels for. What first begins to feel a little like a fratboy idealization of Before Sunrise (displaced American meets gorgeous woman in an exotic location and together they discuss the pains, confusion, joys and fears of life) quickly morphs into a creature feature that keeps its two leads’ personalities central to the story. The desired woman turns out to be 2,000 years old – she’s a constantly changing body that morphs into creatures from her evolutionary past, sleeping with men to obtain their cells and regenerate. Will this prove to be a dealbreaker for the smitten lovers? A welcomed odd sense of humor present throughout (she’s a sea creature/zombie, he’s a chain smoker) and its cinematography quite strong in areas (the aerial shots are stunning), Spring is a film that delights equally in the human flesh and the insects and vermin that inhabit the Earth. It also gives a nice, explicit nod to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which is always welcome.

On the retrospective side of things, A Reflection of Fear, a 1973 incestual murder mystery that echoes Agatha Christie and Edward Albee, features a disturbed teenage girl reunited with her father after many years apart. How disturbed is she? She hears voices and talks to “something” hiding behind her plentiful dolls in her bedroom. Once she becomes obsessed with dear old dad, the women in her life start being offed one-by-one. Does someone see them as a potential threat? A six-time Academy Award nominee for his cinematography on such films as Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Heaven Can Wait, William A. Fraker directed this unique headscratcher, featuring multiple shots of ominous peering eyes observing conversations from a distance (László Kovács was the DP) and a rather unsettling and bizarre twist ending that you couldn’t possibly see coming (but would be replicated in a 1983 summer camp slasher starring Felissa Rose).

Were you able to attend Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood, our inaugural offering in our brand new Screen Forward initiative, last week at the Made in New York Media Center by IFP? We had a blast and really hit the ground running! Special guests included Tukel, select cast members (such …]]>

Were you able to attend Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood, our inaugural offering in our brand new Screen Forward initiative, last week at the Made in New York Media Center by IFP? We had a blast and really hit the ground running! Special guests included Tukel, select cast members (such as Dustin Guy Defa and Melodie Sisk), Indiewire chief film critic Eric Kohn, TROMA co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, former executive director of the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, Patricia Swinney Kaufman, legendary independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden, and FANGORIA’s Sam Zimmerman. Be sure to check out our Facebook and Twitter pages for more photos from the week.

If you’d like to get a taste of our upcoming week-long theatrical Screen Forward offerings (including Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely), then be sure to check out some of the trailers on the IFP Youtube channel. This will be updated as we announce our line-up for the spring.

As the award-winning documentary Virunga from director Orlando von Einseidel gets set to premiere on Netflix and in theaters next month, IFP has now released two videos from a special screening held on September 16th at the Director’s Guild of America theater. Presented by ENVISION, “a unique collaboration between IFP and …]]>

As the award-winning documentary Virungafrom director Orlando von Einseidel gets set to premiere on Netflix and in theaters next month, IFP has now released two videos from a special screening held on September 16th at the Director’s Guild of America theater. Presented by ENVISION, “a unique collaboration between IFP and the United Nations Creative Community Outreach Initiative (CCOI), [organizing] annual gatherings that have connected UN experts and NGO advocates with some of the most creative minds in filmmaking and new media,” the documentary, focusing on the political hardships rampant in Africa’s Virunga National Park, screened during IFP’s 36th Annual Independent Film Week.

]]>http://www.ifp.org/resources/virunga/feed/0The Talk of the Town: Discussing Film Across North America in Septemberhttp://www.ifp.org/resources/the-talk-of-the-town-discussing-film-across-north-america-in-september/
http://www.ifp.org/resources/the-talk-of-the-town-discussing-film-across-north-america-in-september/#commentsThu, 25 Sep 2014 17:32:29 +0000http://www.ifp.org/?p=21060If you love to listen to filmmakers and industry men and women discuss their trade, providing an insider’s voice on the business trends and economic upticks of the motion picture industry, then chances are you attended the just-wrapped 2014 Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week! And if you’re on a …]]>If you love to listen to filmmakers and industry men and women discuss their trade, providing an insider’s voice on the business trends and economic upticks of the motion picture industry, then chances are you attended the just-wrapped 2014 Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week! And if you’re on a film panel/discussion kick and find yourself craving more, get comfortable for a few hours.

We searched the web to gather some of the most interesting and high profile film-related discussions that took place in North America this month. Some are from the recently wrapped Toronto International Film Festival, the “just about to open” New York Film Festival, the Film Society’s John Waters retrospective, and David Poland’s always addictive DP/30 series. Enjoy!

When I was four years old, I thought I had a little creature who lived in my stomach called Maynard. Maynard was a pretty cool guy. He was a busy man with a normal job. He did normal things like grocery shopping and took vacations to unpopular destinations like Delaware …]]>

When I was four years old, I thought I had a little creature who lived in my stomach called Maynard. Maynard was a pretty cool guy. He was a busy man with a normal job. He did normal things like grocery shopping and took vacations to unpopular destinations like Delaware and Walla Walla Washington. But most of the Maynard’s duties were to be a facilitator of my hunger needs and feelings. He was my hunger surrogate creeping around in my stomach. My sister would ask me, “How’s your Maynard doing?” and my typical response would be:

“He’s fine. He hates being at work today but what can you do?”

“He’s starving! His wife forgot to pack him a baloney sandwich for lunch.”

“I’m not sure? He’s on vacation right now and I don’t know if he’s coming back!”
As I got used to talking about Maynard, it became less about my current state of hunger and more about Maynard’s personal trials and tribulations. He began to get arrested for reasons unknown. His wife would leave town and take the kids on trips without him. Many of times she would return home from a trip and she’d find out Maynard lost all their money on a bad hand at the casino. What ever my imagination wanted to imagine, Maynard would do it. My family members started getting involved with Maynard’s life struggles and they’d prompt me to create more bizarre scenarios for him to sink into. Occasionally they’d give me advice to help Maynard out of a sticky situation. All we could do was talk about it and hope he figures a way out of his conundrum.
IFP Film Week is my current day Maynard. It is an arena for me to talk about my current episodic series future in a proactive manner. All of the projects that get into film week have a creative life and all of us are trying to actualize our own definition of success, hopes and dreams for our project. Here at film week there are no wrong answers, only possibilities. I’m proud to be the first group of web series to attend IFP film week. We are embarking on a whole new territory of how we watch and tell stories in the digital realm. It’s now day three of film week and I have already learned so much about what is possible with the future of episodic story telling. I’m excited and confident that projects like my own can become available to audiences around the world just as Maynard did many years ago.

]]>http://www.ifp.org/resources/my-so-called-maynard/feed/0Direct Positive Film Developinghttp://www.ifp.org/resources/direct-positive-film-developing/
http://www.ifp.org/resources/direct-positive-film-developing/#commentsWed, 17 Sep 2014 13:58:50 +0000http://www.ifp.org/?p=21015Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf is a upcoming film, written and directed by Susan Youssef (back row center), selected for the No Borders International Co-Production Market at this year’s Independent Film Week. With her father imprisoned on terrorist-related charges, the film looks at a teenager in Arkansas searching for identity …]]>

Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf is a upcoming film, written and directed by Susan Youssef (back row center), selected for the No Borders International Co-Production Market at this year’s Independent Film Week. With her father imprisoned on terrorist-related charges, the film looks at a teenager in Arkansas searching for identity in her headscarf and a motorcycle. Youssef reports below on her experience representing the film at Independent Film Week.

This is my first time at No Borders, even though I have done the IFP programs Emerging Visions, Narrative Lab, and Emerging Narrative program before. I signed up looking most of all to keep learning.

After pitching at markets, my partner producer Man Kit Lam gives me notes to help improve my delivery. In the past, he has said “Speak slower,” or “Let them finish.” Prior, I have been so motivated by my material and the prospects before us, I wanted to move as quickly as possible forward in our meetings. I began this process fresh out of film school, and I just knew there was so much work to do and I HAD to do it.

This No Borders market, indie vet director and producer Shari Springer Berman accompanied me to support upcoming feature “Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf,” that I have written and directed. Shari’s big note was, “Be positive!”

My first feature, “Habibi,” was set in the Gaza Strip. We heard “No” so much, I even wondered sometimes if people created new reasons to say no to us! It became a habit of thinking that certain partnerships are just not a possibility for me.

Shari really helped me understand that even though, for example, I am meeting with a company that I have met in the past, this is a new

contact, for my new project, at a new time. No matter what had happened in the past, I have to really give that person a chance to make the best for our new project. They, after all, requested a meeting with us.

I understand how few movies get into theatrical distribution or even get shot onto film these days. These are two dreams of mine for “Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf.”

Already in a few days, I have learned how much my attitude has to be readjusted to the complete infinity of possibility lying ahead for me and my dreams.To deny those showing up for me of anything less than a complete open heart to their ideas and time is a disrespect to my occupation as a professional dreamweaver.

When I sit in the Kaplan Penthouse 10th floor during these meetings, I look out at the sky beyond us and surrounding us through the giant windows. There is no better setting for flying upward.

The Made In NY Media Center (MC) Coordinator is a part-time position, 20 hours per week. Commitment includes 10:00A – 6:00P shifts every Saturday and Sunday, and one 4hr shift from 6:00P – 10:00P during the week (day varies).

Coordinator reports to the Manager of Events of Operations. Coordinator works …]]>

The Made In NY Media Center (MC) Coordinator is a part-time position, 20 hours per week. Commitment includes 10:00A – 6:00P shifts every Saturday and Sunday, and one 4hr shift from 6:00P – 10:00P during the week (day varies).

Coordinator reports to the Manager of Events of Operations. Coordinator works closely with MC staff and members to fulfill the organizations’ unique mission. Coordinator must support the acquisition of new members and experience of existing ones by providing a tremendous customer service experience. The Coordinator’s primary responsibilities include greeting prospective and existing members, guests, and staff when they walk in the door, monitoring the facility to ensure the standards set forth for safe, practical and functional operations, helping to smoothly run events and programs, supporting initiatives & projects as well as providing tours to guests, potential new members, etc. The MC Coordinator assists all members with any resources or tools, including technical or facility- related issues. Full knowledge of all Incubator Members and Community Members and their business/projects is integral to the position. The Coordinator must be self-motivated, highly organized and have a strong interest in working in a busy media/tech environment. Emphasis on customer service is paramount.